Charles Minshew (’11)

In 2013, I was part of the staff of The Denver Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for our coverage of a mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado. That same year, our staff was also a finalist for that same award, for coverage of a wildfire that destroyed more than 300 homes in the Mountain Shadows subdivision of Colorado Springs, Colorado. While city officials were not happy with us, and even threatened to sue the newspaper, we received notes from hundreds of residents thanking us for letting them know the fate of their homes.

In 2016, my reporting on use of force by the Orlando Police Department won the Online News Association’s award for the best investigative data journalism work of the year. Along with Rene Stutzman, we found that the Orlando Police Department used force more than double the rate of other similarly sized cities in the United States. In addition to the award, the city of Orlando began releasing incident-level data on use of force records after we published a database of thousands of incidents, all which had to be manually entered by a team of reporters.

This isn’t an award, but it’s something I do find very rewarding. During my time as a trainer with Investigative Reporters & Editors, and to this day, I’ve had the chance to train more than 1,000 journalists from around the world. I get this incredible feeling of pride when I see the work that these journalists are doing in their community on a daily basis. In fact, today, as I was driving from Atlanta to Marietta, I heard the work of a reporter I trained in an investigative journalism boot camp on All Things Considered on NPR. I’m so thankful I’ve had the chance to share what I have learned with so many other journalists.